I track people who are disrupting the world of mobile technology. Non-conformists, innovators and agitators are this blog's unsung heroes, from entrepreneurs to scientists, to rebellious hackers. I'm the author of "We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous and the Global Cyber Insurgency", (Little Brown, 2012) which The New York Times called a "lively, startling book that reads as 'The Social Network' for group hackers." I recently relocated to Forbes' San Francisco office, and was previously Forbes' London bureau chief from 2008-12, interviewing British billionaires like Philip Green and controversial figures like Mohammed Al Fayed; I wrote last year's billionaires cover story on Russia's Yuri Milner, and have broken stories like the Facebook-Spotify partnership in 2011. Before all this I had stints at the BBC and as a radio journalist. You can watch me on 'The Daily Show' here. If you have a story idea or tip, e-mail me at polson@forbes.com or follow me on Twitter: parmy.

The Start-Up That Wants To Tag The World With Augmented Reality

This is part of a series of dispatches from the TED Global 2012 conference themed on Radical Openness. Follow the Twitter hashtag #TEDGlobal or follow me on Twitter:@Parmy

Representatives from Aurasma demonstrate their augmented reality mobile app, bringing a painting of Robert Burns to life. Photo via TED Global

By now we’re all familiar with the act of tagging photos on Facebook and uploading images to Twitter. But what if you could tag a real-life building with a photo of yourself or some other content, as a form of virtual graffiti? What if when someone else walked past that building a month later, they could hold their phone in front of it to bring up that same content?

Aurasma, a start-up based in Cambridge, U.K. that was spun out of Autonomy Corporation, is aiming to do just that with the mobile app it created almost exactly year ago. Two of its representatives spoke at the TED Global conference in Edinburgh on Tuesday about how their one-year-old company was aiming to become a platform for sharing augmented reality-style content through mobile phones.

During their talk, Matt Mills and Tamara Roukaerts demonstrated the technology by tagging Mills’ photo on his name badge, then filming the TED audience obediently, and enthusiastically, doing the wave. Once the app spent a few minutes processing the video, Roukaerts could point the phone at Mills’ name badge again and load up a short video of the TED audience, superimposed over the badge. The badge had effectively been “tagged” with that video of the wave.

Augmented reality still has to gain traction. For a start, it’s hard at this point to see the idea of tagging a name badge or anything else on a regular basis as useful. Augmented reality as a technology still has to shake off its gimmicky feel, and the Aurasma app itself — at least the ‘Lite’ version that I tried for a short while — seems to have a ways to go for being more than a pretty cool pub trick.

Mills says augmented reality also has yet to reach the mainstream because the technology requires so much processing power. If an organization wants to create an augmented reality application, it can end up taking up as much as 80 megabytes in size. “That barrier has put people off,” Mills says.

But he claims Aurasma has circumvented that problem. “What we’ve built is a platform where anyone can create augmented reality with little effort,” he says of their app, which is around 10MB and acts as an open platform to share processing power. “You can take a photo of something and tag the world up.”

Last year Huffington Post technology journalist Larry Magid said that Aurasma’s technology could change the way we looked at real-world objects. But all that will depend on Aurasma’s execution of its technology and as a business. See a demo via HuffPo’s Magid, below.

What’s intriguing about Aurasma is how its potential goes further. Mills says there are other existing companies using augmented reality platforms based on the company’s technology, meaning that over time, other creators of augmented reality content could start sharing it over Aurasma’s platform. It could be a while before that happens, though.

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It looks so cool. but the main thing is whether the conversion is happening. How many people are willing to buy using AR applications. I am not doubting about future of AR. that is there but whether is it a right time? Are Retailers making money? Have written a post about the topic.